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SimCity Deluxe

Publisher: EA–Price: $0.99–Simcity Deluxe is the mobile version of EA’s hit city planning simulation. This iDevice version is much closer to SimCity 4 than SimCity Societies, the most recent SimCity desktop title that branched off of the conventional SimCity style. As I downloaded this application, I was questioning how EA was going to make a condensed mobile version of such a complex game where every small feature seems to count. On the iPod Touch I tested it on, the lack of screen real estate makes it very hard to play. The whole game is very laborious, and all the messages take a very long time to load. Easily the worst part of this game is the stability. Though most people may think stability is just a bump in the road, but every time I started getting into the game about ten or fifteen minutes into opening the app, it would just crash. It happened in lots of instances, most of them when I was trying to view the budget or a news article. Plus, the autosave never actually worked during a crash, so that feature could help the cause, but it’s as much rubbish as the stability itself. The content in the game is good: there is just about every public building offered, but the road options are limited to one, whereas there are many different road types in the desktop version. There’s no customization either, which was a bummer, too. For a dollar, SimCity Deluxe is a fun game for those in the market for a city planning simulation, but there are some huge setbacks, like the horrible stability and limited features. Overall, though, I still enjoyed the addicting gameplay and amazing reuse value that every SimCity has to offer since the very first edition (introduced 20 years ago), including this iDevice version. This is why it gets an 8 out of 10.